


lightning on stone

by Nomette



Series: elekdei master collection [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Other, Vampires, Violence and Gore, meet cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 06:08:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28466577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nomette/pseuds/Nomette
Summary: A brief list of things Elekti likes: loud songs, rough sex, nights that feel like they go on forever, and the look of shock on someone's face right before they get hit. Thankfully, the underground city has all of these in spades, and tonight Elekti is free to take whatever delights the night offers her. No companions, no obligations, just a little liquor and the light-headed happiness of knowing you're about to make a bad decision.Elekti likes a lot of things, but she likes bad decisions best of all.
Relationships: Elekti Raicoh/Iandei Kurosade
Series: elekdei master collection [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123436
Kudos: 5





	lightning on stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pH5_4](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pH5_4/gifts).



> A huge thank you to pH5_4 for letting me play around in his lovely setting! Elekti and the setting are his, and idiot vampire hunter Iandei is mine.

A brief list of things Elekti likes: loud songs, rough sex, nights that feel like they go on forever, and the look of shock on someone's face right before they get hit. Thankfully, the underground city has all of these in spades, and tonight Elekti is free to take whatever delights the night offers her. No companions, no obligations, just a little liquor and the light-headed happiness of knowing you're about to make a bad decision.

Elekti likes a lot of things, but she likes bad decisions best of all. 

There's a party tonight. There's always a party. But tonight the party is from a rich old family, determined to show off their wealth and their taste and their blah, blah, blah. Elekti never listens to those kinds of speeches for long. They head towards the sound of the music, pleasantly tipsy, a shadow that flits through the air faster than the eye can track. The house is a collection of bright lights, an upside down castle that hangs cavernously from the city's ceiling like an oversized bat.

No guards at the gate. There are two dead bodies in the path leading to the front door. Interesting. Neck open on both, splayed vertebra open to the world. The bone is sliced, not crushed, and the pulped, destroyed heart lies to the side, useless. These sad bastards won’t be coming back from this. Elekti leaves the bodies where they fell and walks on.

The front door is closed and barred, but those tepid precautions won’t work on Elekti. She lifts her foot and kicks, and the door shatters. It flaps and bangs into the wall with a crash that reverberates through the castle. The smell of death rushes out from the hollow entryway, where an elaborate chandelier and staircase preside over an empty room. Elekti stops their breath to listen, but their keen hunter’s senses don’t pick up a single sound, not one footstep or rustle of leather from a guest moving through a room. Only the music plays, a loud track repeating over and over in an endless empty waltz. 

It’s a mystery. It’s a game. Elekti is in the mood to play.

They take out their hammer, enjoying the heft of it, the way it sits comfortably in their hand, heavy and hard, Elekti’s favorite toy. Hammer in hand, they go into the castle and up into the house. They find their third dead body on a balcony, gazing out at the bright lights of the city with mute eyes, their ribcage bisected by something that pierced through the heart. At a glance, the murder weapon was probably a short sword or a long knife. Again, the heart lies to the side, crushed and presented on a serving plate. 

The fourth body lies close to a fifth, and the room stinks of silver. There was a fight here, judging by the blood splatter, but a brief one. The killer incapacitated one woman, then killed the second as she tried to run. Vampire hunters? Elekti’s first thought was a political rivalry, but vampires don’t generally carry silver. An invasion? An attempt by a rival clan to frame a human for something they did with their own hands?

None of these strikes were from the front. None of these people saw their assailant before they died. Cold, impersonal, boring. That doesn't seem like a feud at work. Elekti has killed enough people to know what it looks like when a murder is personal, but none of these bodies have been desecrated. They just lie where they fell, their hearts pulped and tossed to the side. And there’s something else, a common scent, a scent so faint it can barely be detected through the scent of cold, congealing vampire blood. 

A human scent. A hunter? Whoever this person is, they’ve got a heart hewn from stone. 

Slowly, finding bodies as they go, Elekti rises through the hollow castle, accompanied only by the dead and by the slow, skin-prickling sensation that they're not alone, not at all All the doors have been locked. Elekti takes great pleasure in kicking them open. She finds bodies in the sitting rooms and bodies in the hallways, bodies in bedchambers, soaking blood into expensive carpets, and bodies on the dance floor, lying in the orbits of their final dance. 

The killer is fast, and Elekti thinks it must be one killer. A group wouldn’t be so consistent. Always the same quick, sharp cuts, from the same angle, and the methodical removal and destruction of the heart. There’s a room with no bodies that smells of silver and human sweat, an out of the way closet where the hunter must have stopped to rest before continuing into the castle. 

Judging by the blood splatter, the killer must be short. Whoever they were, they entered on the ground floor, as Elekti did, and rose through the castle, sealing the doors behind them as they went. They have some ability to enter rooms invisibly or through walls, as many of these corpses died facing the only possible entryway to a room. 

When Elekti reaches the highest level of the castle, the blood on the party trays is still warm. The tang of iron is in the air. Elekti can smell the lingering, recent presence of a vampire hunter. A bold opponent, a real opponent. Elekti never liked these snobby preening minor nobles anyway. 

Elekti’s heart is thrumming with every step, a countdown to the confrontation approaching her like thunder, the beat of her heart like the introduction to a beloved song. It’s time to dance. Elekti takes a swig of blood from the party tray, tipsy with something stronger than liquor, and strides boldly down the hallway, trailing lighting as they go. With every footstep, with every inhale, with every moment, they can feel the hunter’s attention like a shadow at their back. 

“HELLO!” Elekti screams, and kicks in the closest door. “Come out and PLAY!”

The silence is louder after the scream. A few floors down, the music's still playing. It drifts up in muffled clusters of notes, but there’s something else. Something closer. Out of the corner of her eyes, Elekti catches a glimpse of something moving. A shadow, the trace of something moving. When she whirls, there’s nothing behind her but empty air. 

“You want to play tag?” she calls. There’s lightning rising in her body like a scream, sparks shivering over the surface of her skin in bursts of shocking white. She lets it build until it’s almost unbearable, and then she lets go. She slams her hammer down into the floor, and a rush of lightning lights up the entire upper floor of the castle with a sound like thunder. The building trembles.

“YOU’RE IT!”

There’s- a sound, or not quite a sound. A sharp inhale. Elekti’s ears are sharp, attuned to the movements of prey- and this hunter is prey now, even if he’s also a predator. Down a hallway, a few rooms over, someone is breathing in with the harsh, sharp breaths that follow an electric shock. The hunt is on. 

Elekti’s hammer shatters the door to splinters, but the room is empty. The hunter was here so recently, the room still smells of their warm skin. Humans can’t help but give off the scent of life everywhere they go, like an invitation to come and eat. Elekti heads down the corridor, busting doors open as she goes, lightning sparking from her fists, energy pooling in her bones. Soon, soon, soon. 

The shuddery sound of a ragged inhale, and then, too late, silence. Elekti is ready to pounce. Elekti is going to drag this silent shadow out and make it bleed. Laughing, she lifts her hammer again, and the room explodes in a riot of lightning. As the floorboards crumble under the force of her strike and lightning splits the air, she catches her first glimpse of the hunter.

It’s a glimpse, nothing more. A shadow down the hall that stumbles, caught for a moment in Elekti’s wide web of lightning, paralyzed and charred. It vanishes, flitting away through a shattered door. The hunter is wearing black. They often do, but it never hides the blood. The hunter is running, and Elekti’s body is screaming for them to chase. 

As she plows into the next room, drunk on the promise of violence, a set of knives comes flying at her, almost too fast to block. Elekti guards her throat with one sleeve, but two of the long, thin knives sail past her block and sink into the soft flesh of her shoulder. She snarls, a wordless, feral promise, and then she screams. 

“I’ll taste your throat for that!”

Somewhere nearby, someone laughs. 

“I doubt you were planning to spare me,” the hunter says, and his voice is very cool. Composed motherfucker. Elekti’s gonna make him cry. 

“Come out, I just want to talk!” Elekti says, slamming her hammer into the wall on the last beat of talk. “Come on! You must want to brag. You killed all these people, aren’t you proud? Big hunter, scared of little old me!” 

Elekti catches the sound the knives make in the air a second too late, and then there’s a knife in the back of her thigh. Motherfucker. If she’d been an instant slower, he’d have sliced open the back of her knee. 

“Come a little closer!” she shouts. There’s enough lightning in her to make the whole room bright, not a single shadow to hide in. Radiating light and fury, she stalks from the room. She breaks into a sprint. 

This time, she catches a glimpse of the hunter before he’s gone. Dark skin, honey eyes, like a clouded mirror of her yellow irises. Some kind of teleport. This time, she’s expecting the knives. If she were running, where would she go? Elekti picks a direction and swings her hammer, and puts enough voltage into the neighboring rooms that the curtains catch fire. 

A brace of knives greet her when she walks into the room where she’s cornered the hunter, but none of them score more than a glancing blow. She’s got a sense of his style now. Fast, direct. He always goes for the soft spots, like the hinge of a joint or the bare surface of a neck. 

“Tag.” Elekti says. 

The hunter smiles. 

“Let’s play,” he says. 

Elekti’s hammer collapses the south wall. Wisely, the hunter isn’t trying to block. They move, fast as a shadow, and for a moment all Elekti can see is debris. She heaves her hammer free and swings again. The floor cracks under the strain. Her hammer sticks in the stone floor for a precious two seconds, and in those two seconds a brace of knives fly at her. Her jacket deflects two, but the last one hits. It slices into the side of her neck, a hairbreadth away from a killing blow. 

For a moment, Elekti’s fury is so great she can see nothing but yellow. 

The room overflows with lightning. 

The varnish on the furniture melts, the wood sizzling and popping. The carpets catch fire. The hunter is caught at last, solid where before he was a shadow, a movement glimpsed from a distance. Elekti rips the knife out of their neck and tosses it to the floor. 

“Got you,” they say. 

Elekti’s killed many people with less lightning than that, melted their skin and bones down to ash and dust. But this hunter is alive. Elekti can see their pulse drumming in their neck like the hoofbeats of a runaway horse, but the hunter’s eyes are dark and steady, remarkably focused for a man who must be on death’s door. Eyes like chips of stone, dark and cold. Elekti wants to peel away all those layers of composure until she hits bottom; wants to turn this statue of a person back to screaming flesh and blood. 

Slowly, deliberately, she claws open the hunter’s collar, revealing the dark skin beneath. Silver necklaces guard the fragile pulse beneath. Elekti’s skin sizzles when she tosses them away, but she doesn’t care. What’s a little pain in the pursuit of fun? Her wounded leg aches with every breath, and her neck is spilling arterial blood into her collar, and every moment she’s still alive feels like pure victory. 

The hunter doesn’t flinch when she leans in, and she likes him a little more for it. 

“Scared?” she asks. 

“No,” he says, and it’s almost disinterested. Elekti would think it was a bluff if she couldn’t smell his burns, the melted skin welling up with fresh blood. 

“Why not?” Elekti asks. 

Bleeding, paralyzed, still crackling with leftover lightning- the hunter smiles. “What do I have to be scared of?” 

Elekti lunges. The hunter’s spine arches when their teeth break the seal of his neck, his blood spilling out into their mouth, hot and sweet. Chest to chest, bodies pressed together, the hunter’s pulse is loud in Elekti’s ear, racing like a runner towards some final gate. There’s nothing like satisfaction of the first bite, teeth sinking in, joined like lovers. The soft sounds of his body only spur Elekti on, hungry for more blood, more violence, more noise. She digs her teeth in, wanting to make him scream, but he won’t obey. 

Her mouth is full of the salty, bitter flavor of human life, and it’s a pleasure as good as any shock. 

When they pull back to regard their prize, the hunter’s pupils are dark, black against honey-gold, lips flat with contempt. Can he move yet? It would take a lot of nerve to hold still through a bite like that, but a hunter like this won’t be lacking in nerve. Elekti could kill him. Elekti should kill him, and yet- maybe there’s a little more fun to be had. 

“Still alive?” 

“A little bored.”

Elekti laughs. She runs her lips along the bloody curve of the hunter’s neck, inhaling the scent of skin and sweat. There’s heat pooling in her belly, her breath coming in short, sharp pants. It’s so good. There’s nothing like the warm, wet pleasure of victory. 

“Maybe I should turn you,” Elekti says, and is, at last, rewarded with a look of black fury. That’s how defeated opponents should look, like they’d rather shatter completely then let themselves bend a single inch. 

A flicker of movement, a knife arcing towards Elekti’s throat. She bats it away, but there’s a second knife, closer than the first. It’s sunk a half-inch in her chest before she can catch the hunter’s arm, positioned perfectly between two ribs. A terrible pain crushes in on her ribes, making her light-headed. An inch more and the hunter would have crushed her heart. 

She staggers, and the knife presses further in, all her senses announcing panic with every inch. Even a wound like this can be healed with time, but if she passes out now, she knows she’ll never wake up. She’ll end up nothing more than another body on the floor, ribs split and heart removed. They’re close, so close. Elekti could tear his throat out. But if Elekti moves, will he move too? If her hand falters on the blade she’s done for. 

“What’s your name, little snack?” they ask, licking their teeth. Even the smallest motion can be felt through the point of the knife, a maddening, stinging pain. 

“Do you care about things like that?” the hunter says. Every word is coated in scorn, the syllables bitten-off and furious. 

“I asked, didn’t I? Seems like I should know, considering that we’re so close.” She can feel a smile stretching over her curved teeth. “You’ve even got your knife in me.”

“If I told you, what would you do?” The hunter shows their own teeth in a flat, insane grin. “Kill my family? Hunt down my friends?”

“Would you believe me if I told you no?”

“What choice do I have but to believe you, when we’re so close?”

Elekti laughs. She doesn’t mean to. Every movement cuts her just that little bit more open, but it’s impossible not to laugh in the face of such stubborn, impossible jackassery. This hunter is such a deliciously vicious bitch. 

“Elekti Láikaa,” she says. “You can come find me.”

They’re close, so close, close enough that Elekti can feel the hunter’s inhaled breath on her chest, cool against the warm drip of her blood. Is it just her injuries that are making her light-headed?

“Heavenly Thunderstrike, huh? You look like a rabid street dog.”

“Be careful that I don’t bite,” Elekti says. 

“Too late for that.”

It’s been a while since Elekti held eye contact with anyone for this long. They’re not really the type to gaze into people’s eyes while they kill them. Love and death are only as intimate as you make them. 

Static twines in the air between them, conducted through the point of the knife, but the hunter doesn’t flinch. It’s just a little shock, practically a love tap. The hunter doesn’t even react. 

“What’s it take to make you scream, hmm?”

“More than what you’ve got.”

“Oh, but you’ve barely seen what I’ve got to offer. Don’t you want more?”

They’re maddeningly close. The hunter’s leg is between Elekti’s thighs, and the smell of blood in the air is maddening. Elekti wants. Slowly, terribly, they tip towards each other, and Elekti feels the redistribution of weight at the tip of the knife. Weight, and then pressure. The hunter’s mouth on her mouth. Soft, then hard, fast, sloppy, open-mouthed kissing, tasting like blood and the sweet, heady rush of bad decisions. This hunter must be insane, to lick his own blood from Elekti’s teeth. 

When they part to pant for breath, the hunter’s own blood is smeared around his mouth, red and gold, someone’s expensive toy. 

“Tough guy, hu~uh?” 

The hunter licks his teeth. 

“It’s my blood. I wanted it back,” he says.

“But you’ve got so much.”

“I don’t like to share.”

“I can tell. You went through this who~ole castle by yourself. If I weren’t here, you’d have no one to play with.”

In response, the hunter twists the knife, ever so slightly. Elekti’s breath stutters. Damn if that doesn’t fucking HURT. 

“This isn’t a game.”

“Isn’t it? Aren’t you having fu~un?”

Elekti’s lightning is coming back. Brink of death or not, Elekti’s ready to give it her all. In the instant before the thunderclap, the hunter shows his teeth in a flat smile, and then he’s gone. Elekti staggers, blood spurting from her ribcage. The hunter’s taken his knife with him.

Elekti staggers into the hallway, and there, down at the end, the hunter is silhouetted against the window. 

“Iandei Kurosade,” he says, and then he’s gone, blurred and vanished like a shadow in fog. Elekti runs to the window and sees him, already too far to chase, a shadow that flits between rooftops before vanishing entirely. Elekti knows his scent now, knows the taste of his blood and the rhythm of his breath. 

Next time, they’ll definitely make him scream. 

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the circus tent! We have slippery unhinged lubed up fantasy, vampires, and rule of cool.


End file.
